At South by Southwest Interactive, Rackspace sponsored the InfoChimps Data Cluster Meetup and a “Non-Relational Database Smackdown” to help developers evaluate the costs and benefits of Cassandra, CouchDB and MongoDB.  This panel features Rackspace’s own Stu Hood, Wynn Netherland of The ChangeLog, and Jan Lehnhardt from CouchDB.  The panel also stars a surprise guest Werner Vogels, who comes from another hosting company that will remain nameless here.  He is discussing the virtues of their own database, SimpleDB.

Rackspace supports an open cloud with both our dollars and our sweat.  We believe customers should be able to use a scalable “NoSQL” database across providers without the fear of vendor lock-in, similar to how MySQL is used across the web today.

Bookmark or take about 45 minutes out of your day to watch this video both praising and panning various NoSQL alternatives, and please share what you think the right solution is in the comments.

As if Austin, Texas couldn’t get any weirder, the Rackspace software development team is deciding to expand its presence in the city. Residents of the area should be on the look out for developers fanatical about distributed systems, the JDK, as well as ping pong tournaments.

“The Rackspace Cloud has seen unprecedented growth from our presence here in San Antonio and we felt the time was right to spread even further into Central Texas. Besides, we’ve taken a liking to Austin City Limits and shows at Stubb’s. It only makes sense,” said Jason Seats, head of software development for the Rackspace Cloud.

Eve Richter, the Emerging Technologies Coordinator for the City of Austin, was weary at first, but has come to like their new residents. “At first, I was a bit scared of them. I mean, all this discussion of Hadoop and Cassandra and Java language bindings. Most of the residents in our fair city don’t even know what MySQL is. Then I realized they were just like all of the other developers in our town. They like beer, tacos, and live music. We are happy to have them.”

Developers in Austin are definitely welcome to be themselves. They drive anything from a bicycle to a Viper and heed from anywhere from Blacksburg, Virginia to India. “Austin has nothing to worry about–we are definitely doing our part to keep the city weird”, said Vivek Nagar, Rackspace’s new head of software development in Austin.

If you or someone you know would like to help the Rackspace takeover of Austin, check out the open positions on our career page.

Awesome photo used with permission from stuckincustoms.com (Fanatiguy UFO not included).

According to the CloudKick blog, new, premium features include:

Monitoring Upgrades: Now, users can easily track a wide array of performance metrics, sending alerts at custom thresholds to different addresses. Paid subscriptions support sending SMS alerts – allowing users to instantly respond to infrastructure problems.

The Cloudkick Agent: provides on-machine monitoring for cloud servers. It’s written in C, is very high performance, and has a very low memory footprint. The Cloudkick Agent records disk usage, bandwidth, CPU usage (including “steal time” on most providers), and more. Data collected from the agent goes right into Cloudkick’s graphing engine, making it easy to visualize what’s happening to a servers.

On-machine Diagnostics: Cloudkick now offers a new, sophisticated way for users to diagnose problems. When combined with an installed agent, our diagnostics interface provides on-machine troubleshooting tools that give users the ability to view how much memory and CPU each process is using, right from the dashboard.

Pricing starts at $99 a month for five nodes.

Have questions beyond this?  You can ask me, but you are much better off meeting CloudKick founder Alex Polvi and asking him yourself.   He’ll be hosting a webinar next Thursday at 1 PM CST and can go over anything you’d like to learn about CloudKick’s new features.  Sign up here.

Our friends at Scout App offered to do a webinar showing the ins and out of their monitoring application.  This takes place at 1 PM CST, so don’t miss out.  By attending, you’ll get special access to NEW features not available to anyone else currently! So please tell your friends so they can spend more time hanging out with you and less time setting up monitoring scripts.  You can get the link to sign up here.

Next week, we’ll feature a webinar with Suhail Doshi and the folks at MixPanel about analytics for the real-time web, which you can sign up for here.  Why do I think this product is so cool?  Because if you get TechCrunched, Slashdotted, or Dugg, you can tell when exactly what time the leads are coming, where they are coming from, when they come back and if they buy.  Sweet.

You can search for what you need at tools.rackspacecloud.com for either Cloud Files or Cloud Servers submissions.  We will soon break these down by language to make searching for what you need even easier.

If you are searching for something in particular, you can ping me on Twitter at @michellegreer.  I will be happy to help you, as will my other associates in Corporate Development Bret Piatt (@bpiatt) and Mark Collier (@sparkycollier).  Wade Minter (@minter) is another Racker who has built for our APIs who can help you as well.

If you see any cool submissions that could help out others using our API, please send the GitHub, BitBucket or other URLs to michelle.greer(at)rackspace.com.  Who knows, if you are the most helpful, I might even send you a Threadless tee as I’ve been known to do that in the past.

And then they hit.

Bugs. Lots of them. Users are dropping off like flies. Your app is crashing. A couple of people have said they find your GUI confusing. European users report that it’s loading too slowly. How could all of this be so? You combed over the code a million times and hired a usability expert.

People are no longer interested in your product. Your president/angel investor/VC will not be pleased.

As many problems as you can plan for, there is no substitution for a community of users from around the globe who can report bugs or offer feedback on usability or functionality. There is no substitute for responsible load testing either. How do you get multiple perspectives from users without the potential for losing quality or high numbers of customers?

uTest, a new Rackspace Cloud Featured Partner, is solving this issue. uTest provides on-demand testing services for web, mobile and desktop applications through its community of 20,000+ professional testers from 160 countries around the globe.

HOW IT WORKS:
1.) Sign up for a free uTest account and specify what you would like to test.
2.) uTest will find test users who match your requirements
3.) These users will review your application under real-world conditions and offer constructive feedback. Since they field a variety of test users by skill set and other uTest customers rate them, you can be assured that you’ll get the feedback you need.
4.) You can view bugs and feedback in real-time. Your uTest account holds all of your new projects including bug and user feedback. You can approve, reject or request more information from testers for each reported defect.

And since testing occurs in real-time, uTest helps you get new apps and versions to market more quickly.

Well executed QA means you won’t be turning users into guinea pigs anytime you offer a launch or an upgrade. With so many OS, browsers and plug-ins, and so many different types of users out there, it’s too hard to account for all of it yourself.

To learn more about how you and your app can always be prepared, we are planning a QA webinar on Thursday, February 11 with the people from uTest. Email me at michelle.greer(at)rackspace.com and we’ll make sure you are signed up to learn more or with any questions you may have.

The Rackspace Cloud is proud to announce its partnership with FathomDB, a relational database-as-a-service that got quite a buzz when it launched. FathomDB is a service that will make the day-to-day operations of running a database much simpler, allowing you to focus on higher end tasks of your application.  We see this as a product that will help push MySQL to do bigger and better things.  It is one of the many useful services at our Rackspace Cloud Tools site.

Unless you are one of very few companies, you run your database on MySQL or another relational database.  Whether you are a dedicated DBA or simply the guy who is the most familiar with MySQL, you’ll benefit by FathomDB’s ability to automate backups as well as monitor database performance issues as they arise. There’s no point in guessing how well your database is scaling as you grow because FathomDB shows you.

Here’s a summary from the thorough review at blog.webmynd.com:

“The time savings have been huge. On the backend, we’ve been able to spend our time working on new search technology without having to worry about database admin tasks at the same time. We’ve been able to focus on valuable features, relevant to our business and company, and been liberated from spending time playing the DBA.”

We see this as a strong offering against Amazon RDS because it is easy to set up, easy to use, and has a graphical interface not available in RDS.  It does not feature the lock-in you get by using RDS either.

The service starts at two cents an hour and varies according to server and disk space usage.  For the peace of mind that your database is always properly backed up and running properly, it’s worth it.  For more info, please visit FathomDB.com or attend our webinar featuring FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara on December 22 at 1 PM CST.
Read the full press release here.

The CloudKick interface allows you to tag your instances so they are easy to find, color code them so you don’t accidentally shut off something you shouldn’t, check the states of your instances, as well as SSH in.  You can batch monitor instances as well as check out graphs to see how you are doing.   If you don’t want to check into the CloudKick interface all the time, set up monitoring alerts to send to your email.

We will be featuring CloudKick again soon as they will be launching new cool features soon.  Follow @cloudkick and their founder @polvi on Twitter for more information.  If you’ve used CloudKick before, please check into our Rackspace Cloud Tools site and leave a review for it.

The Rackspace Cloud has partnered with Nayatek in its Datosphere offering.  Datosphere allows small to enterprise level businesses to back up email (including Exchange), IMs, file systems, and other critical information in the cloud.  It allows you to search information by date, keyword, or other criteria.  Because it backs up to the cloud, backups are easy to deploy in minutes.

Why will this excite your boss?
1.) He or she will be better covered against nastiness like lawsuits because records are easily archived and found.
2.) Because you will be backing up to the cloud, you only pay for the storage you need and it’s very easy to deploy.  You can then take the surplus money you would spend on backup on your company holiday party.  Just don’t forget to invite us .

Have you used Datosphere or any of our other innovative partners?  If so, please leave a review on our Rackspace Tools site.  You will be awarded huge karma points and Bret Piatt (@bpiatt), our resident Corp Dev Cloud Geek, might just call you out in Twitter for being really cool.

Rackspace took a lot of feedback in terms of its cloud API and we are seeing a fair amount of activity around it.  Here are a few submissions to our cloud tools site and in GitHub that will make building other tools for our cloud a lot easier:

Compass Cloudfiles PHP API: Cloudfiles PHP API runs on the Zend Framework.

Elastic Rack: Java API for the Rackspace Cloud.

JClouds: Cloud storage interoperability API in Java.

C#/.NET API for Rackspace Cloud Files: New release enabling support for referrer acls and user agent acls on public containers.

RightScale Ruby Gems: Ruby client library with full programmatic access to Rackspace Cloud.

Ruby Cloud Files: Ruby API Library for Cloud Files.

LibCloud: a standard client library for many popular cloud providers, written in Python.

PHPRackCloud: PHP client library to use Rackspace CloudServer API from inside your PHP application.

Rackspace Cloud PHP library: PHP5 client library to talk to the Rackspace Cloud API.

I’m sure I’m missing some here, so we’d really appreciate it if you’d drop links to other APIs and client libraries in the comments of this post.  You can also check out many other tools for the Rackspace Cloud at our GitHub account.

If you already have a tool that works with our API, feel free to submit it to our tools site by filling out this form.